Review—Name recognition means zip if fixes aren't universal and devs have no lead time.

Game on: Fire TV as a console contender

When Ouya emerged as the first major Android-backed gaming device for TVs, its pioneer status ultimately didn’t amount to much. The $99 hardware didn’t efficiently fuel a lot of full-screen, 3D gaming. The overpriced, $49 controller suffered from sticky buttons and wonky Bluetooth connections.

Even so, the company was hungry to eke out a reputation as the ultimate indie development platform. While its Free The Games promotion came with complaints and concerns, it also attracted enough solid and quirky developers to ensure Ouya’s storefront, while uneven, wasn’t a ghost town of crap apps and lazy mobile-game ports.

Other Android gaming boxes have launched since, but none start with the combination of brand recognition, hardware competency, and financial muscle of the new Amazon Fire TV. Then again, none have launched with a weirder shoulder shrug about games either. The Fire TV hit Amazon’s listings last week with an official Bluetooth games controller, an exclusive game from Amazon Studios, and the promise of more exclusives to come. Yet, the company has called games a “bonus” for the hardware as opposed to a dedicated reason to buy in.

That’s worth noting, because the Amazon Fire TV currently exists as a polar opposite gaming device to the Ouya, at least within the restraints of an Android-driven, $99 device market. Where the Ouya’s controller disappointed, Amazon’s is quite functional. The Ouya’s wimpy innards have been surpassed, too. But right now, Amazon hasn’t delivered an ecosystem of games worth feeling optimistic about. Worse for Amazon, Fire TV’s games are, for the most part, too technically underwhelming to embarrass Ouya as much as they could.

Tale of the tape

We spoke with game makers during last month’s GDC, before Amazon announced its long-rumored living room box, and asked what was on their wish list for a refreshed Ouya. Their response was brief and unanimous: a snappier processor and more RAM.

The Amazon Fire TV has beaten any sort of “Twouya” to the market with both of those wishes locked and loaded—namely, a 1.7GHz Qualcomm quad-core Krait 300 and 2GB of RAM, not to mention an Adreno 320 GPU. We sideloaded some tests onto our new Fire TV to verify the numbers impact.

We’re not shocked to see Amazon handily outpace Ouya in these tests, particularly GFXBench’s 3D-intensive, RAM-craving demos. For the most part, the Fire TV also bested its almost-identical twin in the HTC One, which could imply that Amazon has chosen to push the hardware’s energy limits without worrying about a smartphone’s battery life or heat dissipation issues.

Meanwhile, the Apple TV numbers are a good indicator that, should Apple follow through on rumors and release its own 1080p-capable gaming equipment, the old, single-core A5 unit isn’t going to cut it. Better put, early Apple TV adopters aren’t going to get a games-friendly firmware update.

Enlarge/ Worth noting, the Amazon Fire HD has no expandable memory option, and its advertised "5.49GB" of free space comes closer to 5.16GB. Even filling the device that far, which giant games can do quickly, will force users to delete before they can keep playing games.

Measuring exact differences between games on Ouya and Amazon Fire TV is a little tougher than grabbing these stats, however, because the systems have so little overlap in selection. Only three major game series exist on both storefronts, two of which—2D trivia game You Don’t Know Jack and Double Fine’s slow adventurer The Cave—don’t exactly strain the hardware.

What remains is the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, which mostly consists of emulated ‘90s classics. 2013’s Android edition of Sonic 4 Part 2 is on both stores, and it seemed like the best option for comparison’s sake. The game offers a combination of mostly 3D worlds and high-speed platforming, yet in testing, even this didn’t bear out.

Fire TV's version of the game runs at a smoother frame rate, lingering near 30 frames a second with occasional moments of jutter, compared to the Ouya edition’s nearly constant jutter. However, Amazon's version has actually removed background 3D models and real-time lighting effects—perhaps as a cheap, last-minute way to optimize the Amazon launch edition. Thus, not only must we dismiss a direct comparison, we’re also a little concerned that the Fire TV build doesn’t blow the pants off of Ouya’s by, say, landing somewhere in the 60 frames-per-second range.

The controller's flat face doesn't affect comfort after long sessions.

The controller's flat face doesn't affect comfort after long sessions.

Player 1 indicator is lit up. Also, yes, the controller's crevices have already picked up junk in only a few days of testing.

Aw, look, they're friends.

Before we dig into other software on the new system, the controller is worth mentioning, especially because it’s one of Amazon Fire TV’s best assets at this point. Microsoft should be flattered, because its 360 controller has been largely copied here, both in button layout and general feel.

The gamepad is slightly shorter than the 360’s, but otherwise has roughly the same width, depth, and weight. Amazon’s joysticks offer both wider rotation and lower tension, meaning they whip around a little more loosely than the 360’s (though not by an amount that impacts gameplay in the shooters tested). Sadly, Amazon’s d-pad replicates the annoying bits of Microsoft’s, particularly in serving imprecise motions every so often.

Amazon’s trigger buttons are a little shallower, which is barely noticeable, but the bumpers have a much smaller impact zone, meaning you’ll have to raise your fingers to the buttons’ inner-most point to consistently register. A quick session of Zen Pinball, which expects you to use the bumpers for pinball flippers, proves just how uncomfortable this design can be. Other than that, the construction, buttons, and joysticks feel solid, not cheap. While the Fire TV pad’s face flattens out, unlike the rounded offerings from Microsoft and Sony, this design move has no impact on comfort.

Additionally, Amazon's pad contains six buttons from the remote, including rewind/play/forward toggles and the Android three-button group of back, home, and menu. Unlike the remote, this also includes a GameCenter-specific button, but so far, all this button does is replicate the home button when mid-game.

Those buttons seem redundant, considering Amazon could have mapped multimedia functionality to the ABXY array in non-game apps instead. Perhaps an Amazon higher-up was upset that the remote’s useful microphone didn’t make its way into the controller, and thus these extra multimedia buttons came to be.